Blogs

My article, The State of Video Codecs 2015, from the Streaming Media Sourcebook, is up on StreamingMedia.com. Here are the first few paragraphs to let you know what I covered.  Video compression is the critical enabler of all video streaming, and today we’re at a codec crossroads unlike any that we’ve experienced. Though H.264 remains firmly entrenched as the go-to …

As mentioned previously, I’m producing a free webinar entitled Replacing Flash with the Media Source Extensions/Encrypted Media Extensions on March 16, at 1:00 PM EST. It’s sponsored by Onstream Media. You can read the description and signup here.  To supplement the information that I compiled, I asked a number of collegues the following questions: For computer distribution –           Assuming your …

I’m producing a free webinar entitled Replacing Flash with the Media Source Extensions/Encrypted Media Extensions on March 16, at 1:00 PM EST. It’s sponsored by Onstream Media. Here’s the description.  Flash has dominated the streaming media landscape much longer than anticipated because HTML5-based solutions lacked necessities like adaptive streaming, digital rights management, live streaming, close captions, or even true streaming, …

My course, Video Compression for Web, Disc and PC/TV/Console Playback, is an entry-level video compression course designed to help newbies quickly get up to speed on compression technologies and producing for the various platforms listed in the title. It now has 119 students, the latest of which, Ian Carpenter, shared his thoughts in this five star review.  Jan’s knowledge of …

It’s personally gratifying that readers continue to find my book, Producing Streaming Video for Multiple Screen Delivery, useful. Here are comments from the latest five-star review.  I was assigned a Video Conversion and Compression project at work, and I began to look for a good source of information on the subject. I’m glad that I found this book, because it …

As I’ve observed previously, one of the benefits I get speaking before technical audiences is to hear their insites and experiences. I learned two very valuable nuggets of information from my most recent talk with the VideoTLV group in Tel Aviv.  The first related to the benefit of encoding H.264 and WebM files when creating a single file experience to …

So, YouTube finally went HTML5 first with Flash Fallback, triggering another round of Flash is Dead articles. Hey, didn’t Flash die when Apple shipped the iPad without it? I remember reading lots of articles back then telling me it was so. Well, in truth, it’s a lot truer now, but don’t send flowers to Adobe quite yet, as Flash will …

Sorry for the late notice, the webinar is at 2:00 PM EST, January 28, 2015, and is sponsored by OnStream. Sign up and you’ll get pinged when the archived version is available. Click here to register. Here’s the description: Most streaming producers must distribute to three sets of screens: desktop, mobile, and TV. There are multiple technologies for doing so, including …

I recently finished evaluating Beamr Video. The evaluation included analyzing the quality of the resulting clips using objective measures such as PSNR, SSIM and VQM, and conducting extensive viewing of the optimized clips, assessing their subjective quality compared to the original clips. Following this evaluation, I concluded that “for 99.99% of the expert and average viewers, the Beamr-processed clips would …

Sorenson Media hired a new CEO, Marcus Liassides, with big plans to change Sorenson from a sleepy encoding company to a media powerhouse. I intervewed Marcus on Google Hangouts, which you can watch below. Or, you can read a summary of the interview on streamingmedia.com.